Phanniemay 2016
by Semi-Retired Writer
Summary: A late attempt at Phanniemay 2016. I'm moving future prompts to their own stories instead of adding chapters to this one!
1. Origins

**Origins**

It didn't happen all at once but over a period of years. Samantha Manson at age four had no particular love for the color black, the lifestyle of ultra-recyclo-vegetarianism, or the hobby of goth haiku, yet the same could not be said of Sam Manson at the age of fourteen.

For as long as Sam could remember, her parents—her mother in particular—had been much more controlling than the other kids' parents. No matter what, Sam had to dress the right way, act the right way, be around the right people, and do the right things. One of her earliest memories of her mother was an image of her face contorted in disgust as she saw Sam trying to play with an earthworm in her front yard, along with the echo of some of the berating that followed. Sam hadn't tried to show her mother any of the creatures she saw ever again.

When Sam was eight, she'd wanted to start picking out her own outfits. This was banned by her mother when, one day, she bought herself a band t-shirt—she couldn't even remember which band now—and attempted to wear it with a pair of simple jeans on a school day. She could still remember how her mother had started that lecture: "This is absolutely _not_ proper dress for a young girl of your status!" Sam was forced to allow her mother to choose every weekday outfit from then until she was twelve and finally rebelled. Even after that, her mother would passive-aggressively lay out the outfits she wanted her daughter to wear every day, and sometimes she would even barge into her bedroom in the morning and try to force Sam to put on her choice of outfit.

Age twelve was certainly when everything started for Sam. It wasn't just demanding to choose her own outfits; soon, she was rebelling against everything she could find to rebel against. She'd found that choosing her own clothes to actually reflect part of her personality finally drew friends to her, something that hadn't happened while she'd been dressing and acting like "a proper young lady." She found she couldn't just stop at the clothes; she wanted to show everyone what she was really like, not what her mother wanted her to be like.

The Manson family began having more than its fair share of loud arguments. While Sam's father hadn't very much disapproved of the outfits she'd been choosing at first, even he couldn't just ignore it when she began dressing in a mixture of crop tops, tight jeans, short skirts, leggings, and other pieces, all in the darkest blacks she could find. From there, it was her hair. Once long and well-maintained—even when they were arguing, her mother insisted on brushing it to perfection and providing only the best hair products for her daughter—it was now a much simpler shoulder-length cut that may have been forgiven if not for the ridiculous small ponytail their daughter insisted on always having, right at the top of her head. As a child, Sam had always loved the somewhat gentle genres her mother suggested: jazz, some country music, and the pop songs that her mother preapproved. Suddenly, Sam loved punk, metal, and electronica music, knowing her parents couldn't stand any of the three. Sam's parents had never believed in grounding, considering it something that only lesser parents did to their children, and so nothing stopped Sam from blasting metal at all hours of the day using the stereo in her bedroom. Later, it was her diet that changed. Sam had never been especially picky about her food with relatively rare exceptions, and suddenly, she insisted she "wouldn't eat anything with a face." Mrs. Manson had no idea how to react to this declaration, and her daughter refused to eat most of each meal for almost a week before her mother decided to talk to their chef about personalizing her daughter's meals.

Sam couldn't handle all the arguing and began to spend more time away from her family. She began spending so much time with her two somewhat new best friends that by the time they were fourteen, they all felt like they'd known each other their whole lives instead of just those past two years. When she wasn't with her friends, she was often reading anything she could get her hands on at Amity Park's local library or listening to goth haiku at her favorite teen club. Sam was pleased to find that spending time away from her family did reduce the number and intensity of their arguments, but she still wanted to maintain her individuality, and so they still fought somewhat often. At this point, they commonly fought about her clothing, her diet, her hobbies, and her friends.

Sam couldn't tell anyone exactly when she outwardly became who she is, but she knew it had happened somehow, in spite of the pressures of her mother and the disappointment from her father. Sam knew her parents both loved her very much despite the family arguments, but she wasn't going to give up who she was just to keep the peace. Sam could choose how to live her own life.


	2. Fentonworks

**Fentonworks**

Jack and Maddie knew they wanted to start their own small ghost-hunting business shortly after they were married. They just didn't know what to name it.

Maddie was sitting across from her husband at their small kitchen table, brainstorming. They'd been at it for a few hours already that day, each one giving a possible name every so often only for the other to find something wrong with it. Maddie knew she was getting frustrated just sitting there throwing out ideas, so she decided to busy herself as they still discussed names, making some fudge to replace the batch her husband had finished the day before.

"How about Ghost-B-Gone?" Jack threw out as she searched through their cupboards for ingredients.

She giggled. "That one sounds too childish, dear… Why not The Afterlife Investigators?"

"Nah," her husband replied. "That one makes it sound like we just wanna study the ghosts. I want people to know we're here to help them by destroying them!" The room lapsed into silence for a few minutes as both struggled for another idea.

"We could be The Ghostbusters!" Jack exclaimed excitedly.

"No, we can't, honey. That name's already taken."

"Oh, you're right. Man, this is hard." Jack, also growing bored disappeared form the room for a moment, returning with one of their works in progress, a gun that would shoot ecto-energy to harm ghosts and stop them from attacking humans. He pulled out a screwdriver and began tinkering with the currently nonfunctioning weapon.

Maddie eventually broke the silence. "I'm sorry for being so picky about this… I just want us to create a legacy our daughter can be proud of." She held a loose hand on her stomach to emphasize her point, once again remembering that in just a few short months, their beautiful daughter would arrive. Jack produced a short _hmm_ and his face became pensive as he returned to his brainstorming.

Maddie was just placing the fudge in the refrigerator to cool for later when Jack came up with the perfect answer.

"What about Fentonworks? Everyone will know that we're the inventors, and it sounds kind of fancy, like a real company name. We could put drawings of ghosts and some of our weapons in the logo so everyone knows we're ghost hunters!"

And so Fentonworks was born.


	3. Road Trip

**Road Trip**

 _This is just slightly AU to fit the plot I wanted. Explanation: In Reality Trip, Danny sets everything back to the way it was before Freakshow did anything at all with the reality gauntlet. I think Danny wouldn't have just known how to use the gauntlet perfectly with no prior experience, so he would've just turned back time to the start of summer break and dealt with Sam and Tucker forgetting._

Danny had been on a few road trips in his life, but they'd all been with his family and thus came with a little family drama and a lack of the kind of excitement he always saw in the movies when friends traveled together. That, and the one time when he and his friends had dealt with the reality gauntlet… but he didn't really count that trip considering that he was the only one who truly remembered the event after he'd saved the day. Sure, he'd told Sam and Tucker about it after they forgot, but it wasn't really the same when he knew they couldn't remember actually taking a road trip like he could.

Now that he thought about it, if he ignored that time, he hadn't been on any sort of trip in years. Of course, it would be rather difficult to go anywhere now that he was Amity Park's main defense against ghost invasions, and really it was lucky that his parents hadn't tried to take them on a family road trip since he'd gotten his powers…still, it was something he occasionally fantasized about.

That was what led him to jump on his first opportunity for a road trip. Okay, maybe it wasn't a road trip in the common sense of the word, but he could live with a close substitution. Sam had mentioned one day shortly after she'd gotten her driver's license that she wanted to make a trip to a mall in a bordering state to visit a one-of-a-kind clothing store for goths. Danny recognized the opportunity for what it was and became the trip's main organizer despite it initially being planned as a quick solo trip only for Sam's benefit.

Danny wanted to make sure everyone had a good time, so good that they'd have enough great memories to completely make up for that forgotten trip. His first order of business was coming up with an itinerary. Sam and Tucker at first saw this as completely unnecessary, but Danny quickly won over Tucker by finding some sort of tech shop only a few miles away from Sam's destination. Even when he'd mentioned it, Danny wasn't sure what was so great about that particular store for Tucker, but he wasn't going to question anything that made his friends more interested in this road trip. From there, he found a restaurant that was supposedly "the home of the best deep dish pizza in the state," which was a promising place for them to have a late lunch before they returned to Amity Park. He'd yet to find a destination for himself to check out during the trip, but that was less important than being sure Sam and Tucker were fully convinced at the time.

Sam, ever the voice of reason, continued to remind him that he had chosen to be responsible for the town's safety and that his absence wasn't at all likely to go unnoticed. Ghosts did always seem to attack when it was least convenient, and having Amity Park's hero an entire state's distance away was a particularly inconvenient time for a ghost attack. He did spend a fair bit of time struggling with what was honestly a good argument against the road trip…but desperate times called for desperate measures, and so he let himself consider even the most ridiculous of measures, trying to come up with one that could work, just for a single day. One day was all he needed.

That was what led him to recruit Dora and Johnny 13. Dora, for one, wasn't too crazy an idea. She'd proven her trustworthiness plenty of times by now, showing Danny that she wasn't interested in the kinds of cruel and annoying behaviors that most of the other ghosts were. Johnny…well, he was more of a risk, more of a crazy idea, but Danny had figured this would be worth the risk. The plan was for Dora to spend the day guarding the Fenton portal, frightening away any ghost that might try to escape by using her admittedly terrifying dragon form. In return, Danny would help her gather enough ghosts to throw one of the balls she was so fanatical about. After all, he interacted with a lot more of the ghosts outside of her kingdom than she did, so the friendlier ones might actually listen if he invited them to the event. As for Johnny 13, Danny had decided he'd need a backup measure. If Dora couldn't manage to stop every ghost from escaping the Fenton portal or if some ghosts escaped from an unguarded natural portal, Johnny's job was to send them back to the ghost zone. Johnny's shadow certainly caused enough trouble for Danny on the occasions when the two weren't on the same side, so he hoped that the shadow would be able to harm or annoy the escaped ghosts to the point of returning to the ghost zone. Johnny had been particularly easy to convince to take the job with a little… missing information. Danny had extended the offer without mentioning that he would be completely indisposed and unable to fight the ghosts on that day. Instead, he'd claimed he wanted a day off to enjoy himself. Not technically a lie, but certainly not the whole truth. Since Johnny believed Danny would be somewhere nearby to stop him from leaving the ghost zone even during the day off, Danny's offer of allowing Johnny and Kitty to peacefully spend time in Amity Park for the entire day seemed like a fair price for the work.

Surprisingly, Sam finally stopped trying to convince him not to turn her event into a road trip after hearing his plan. He couldn't be completely sure why, but his best guess was that she'd realized he'd do pretty much anything to make this road trip work. Either that, or she had more faith in Johnny and Kitty than he did. Without Sam's resistance, planning became much easier. Tucker was finally just as excited as Danny, and maybe Sam wasn't as enthusiastic as he would have liked, but her newfound tolerance was better than the obstinate refusal from before.

It was Wednesday, and they'd finally agreed that they'd head on their trip on the coming Saturday. They'd come up with their five major stops, and Danny was in full agreement when Tucker suggested they also leave enough free time to be able to stop anywhere unplanned that looked interesting. As far as the locations they were sure they'd be visiting, they'd scheduled Sam's gothic shop, Tucker's tech store, and the pizza place Danny had found earlier, as well as a thrift store whose website promised it specialized in video games and an old-fashioned ice cream joint roughly halfway between Amity Park and their destination that would offer a perfect break from the drive home. Danny had had a small bag packed for the trip since he'd first had the idea, and he checked it yet again that night to make sure he had everything for the perfect road trip.

Saturday arrived after what had felt like an eternity to Danny, and he was beyond excited. Even the failed test Mr. Lancer had handed back to him the day before could hardly touch his excitement; he'd been careful to avoid mentioning that F to his parents just yet in case his parents decided to ground him when they found out. They three had agreed to meet at Sam's house that morning, so Danny was quick to grab his bag and begin his flight to the Manson residence. He phased into Sam's car to prepare for the start of the trip and to drop off his bag before moving on to greet her and then wait together in her living room for Tucker to show up. Luckily, he didn't take long.

The two passengers delayed their start by a couple of minutes with a small argument over who would have to take the backseat, but Sam was soon fed up with the fight and made the decision for them.

"Tucker, you're in front. I only got my license last month, so I'm not even allowed to have two people in the car with me. Danny, if you're in the back, you can just go invisible if I get pulled over. It would look a little weird if any police officer saw me driving around with no one in the passenger seat and Tucker in the back." The reasoning was sound, so Danny climbed into the backseat without further complaint. He caught Tucker's gaze in the rear view mirror and grinned just as Sam turned her key in the ignition and Dumpty Humpty blasted into the car. Sam knew her car had been locked and immediately glared at the obvious perpetrator as she turned Danny's choice of road trip music down to a more bearable level.

"Very funny, Danny." He might have felt a little bad for annoying her, but only if he hadn't seen the smile she was desperately trying to hide from him while she still glared. She pulled out of her driveway, and there were no further incidents until she had just turned onto the first highway of their journey.

"I'm hunnnnnnnnnngry," Tucker groaned, interrupting the group's gossiping about their classmates.

"No way! We did _not_ agree that I would have to stop for food this early," Sam complained. "We're already stopping to eat at two different places. Why didn't you eat before you came over?"

"But I woke up late, and you would've been madder if I'd stopped to eat breakfast!" tucker defended himself.

"Uh, I could go for something to eat too," Danny added, more out of solidarity for his friend than out of actual hunger.

"Fiiiiiine," Sam conceded. "But just wait until you guys get your licenses and are driving _me_ around. I _will_ remember this, and I will make every minute on the road a living hell for you."

Tucker was too distracted by the thought of food to consider the threat and simply cheered. Meanwhile, Danny laughed at her threat, still ninety percent certain he'd never bother getting his driver's license. Who needs to drive when you have ghost powers?

Sam found a Nasty Burger after a few more miles, and she pulled off of the highway and into the parking lot. The music abruptly stopped as she turned her key. Danny looked at her quizzically.

"What? I'm hungry too. I guess we all skipped breakfast, huh?" Danny laughed with Sam as the trio headed into the building and made their orders. They resumed their gossip session as they sat down and ate their food.

The three left the building in much better moods, and they set off on their road trip once more, chattering about their favorite destinations and getting distracted by tangents into other topics. Occasionally, Tucker or Danny would see something amusing from their windows and would point it out to the group. Most of the morning passed like this.

It was just before noon when they reached their first stop: Sam's clothes store. Danny had rarely seen the goth so happy as she was while she pawed through the variety of unique outfits and accessories. Danny hadn't expected to have much fun at their first stop, but it was surprisingly entertaining to watch Sam's reactions to everything. The store was clearly at least as amazing as she'd thought it would be. Eventually, he and Tucker moved to the front of the store to stay out of the shoppers' way and wait for their friend.

As Sam checked out, Tucker was getting more and more excited, knowing his stop was next. It took only a few minutes of driving to reach the store, and Tucker ran in ahead of the other two, trying to take in as much of the store as he could at once. Danny and Sam followed, laughing at their friend's obvious excitement. Danny didn't find the same level of cuteness to Tucker's nerd-out as he did to Sam's, but he was amused nevertheless. Danny and Sam spent most of their time looking at the store's gaming computers, which were probably the only items in the whole shop that either of them would ever use.

Tucker loved the whole shop, but he didn't take quite as much time as Sam had, knowing he could only afford a few of his favorite devices. Soon, they'd made their way back to Sam's car, the trunk already impressively full of shopping bags. They'd planned on going to Danny's stop next, but now that they were here, they all agreed that they'd rather stop for the pizza first since it had been hours since the Nasty Burger detour.

Danny considered the pizzas as they ate—a small mushroom and onion pizza for Sam and a large pepperoni pizza for Danny and Tucker to split. It wasn't that it was bad pizza, but he had a hard time believing that _this_ was the best deep dish pizza in the entire state. Shrugging the issue off, he stood up with his friends to pay for the food and leave the restaurant.

Danny thought the thrift shop was even better than it had sounded online. He'd chosen it in the hopes that all of them could enjoy it, and he was pleased to see he was right. The three stuck together as they looked at their favorite genres and then split up once they weren't interested in the genres the others wanted to move on to. Danny ended up finding a few new games to try out when he had some free time, and Sam and Tucker picked up some games too.

Danny sighed as he moved once more into the back seat. They'd been in the city for almost three hours now, and he could feel the exhaustion that came from waking up early on a Saturday now.

Although the three had agreed to stop anywhere that looked interesting, they'd actually found that they'd already worked everything interesting into their trip. They'd seen a few other places they might have stopped, but with Danny's and Tucker's enthusiasm slowly dying due to sleepiness, they'd all stopped long enough to realize that each of the spots they'd pointed out was pretty similar to some shop or another in Amity Park. With that final conclusion, Sam suggested they begin the drive home.

As they approached the ice cream joint, Sam warned the other two that they were close. With no response, she glanced quickly to the passenger and back seats only to find both of her friends fast asleep. _Oh well_ , she thought. _I didn't really want ice cream that much anyway._ She continued the drive toward Amity Park so she could get her sleepy friends to bed.

Danny woke up only a few minutes too late to ask Sam to stop for ice cream. He thought about how much fun they'd had throughout the day and smiled as he closed his eyes and drifted back into another nap. It had been a perfect road trip.


	4. Ember

**Ember**

All Ember had ever wanted was to be loved.

Her human life had ended much earlier than most, and she couldn't honestly say that she regretted that. She'd grown up with a single mother, never knowing who her father was, and she was still very young when she remembered her mother first telling her that she herself had been an accident. This was a statement that returned every time the two had an argument. As a young teen, it hadn't taken much thinking to recognize the implication that it hadn't been a happy accident. Once, when her mother had had far too much to drink, she'd cried to the girl, lamenting the man she lost when she'd become pregnant, and Ember blamed herself ever since.

At the beginning of her life, she'd believed that deep down, her mother still loved her, but that belief didn't last more than a few years. She'd thrown herself into making friends at school after she realized how her mother likely truly felt, looking for anyone who would like her at all. She made several friends, but each one only lasted for a few days to a few weeks before they left her. Sometimes, they'd just stop "having time" to do things with her and would fade away slowly. Others would be more upfront with her with varying explanations, all centering around how she was being too clingy and wasn't being her own person. Eventually, it was common knowledge that Ember was the girl to avoid in school in order to head off a creepy and obsessive friendship.

She'd eventually noticed that no one was willing to talk to her, no matter who she tried meeting. She tried to get closer to her teachers, but she'd never really been good at most school subjects, and most of the teachers just weren't interested in spending extra time with such a mediocre student. She'd finally followed the advice that came from her ended friendships and took up playing guitar to spend all the free time she had. Some days, she couldn't face another day of no one caring about her, and would drive her problems away, spending hours with just herself and whatever mind-altering substance she could find, lying hidden away from prying eyes in the park down the street from her house. During high school, she'd finally given up on living, but she didn't like to think about that, even so many years after her death.

In her afterlife, she suddenly had much more control over how her life went. It only took a few minutes after realizing she'd become a ghost before she learned to force her will on her own body. Gone was the style she'd had in life, a rather plain look forced upon her by her mother, who would only buy her the cheapest clothes from thrift stores and bargain bins. In its place, she'd decided to adopt the more revealing looks of the sexed-up rock stars she'd always loved so much. Maybe people might love her now that she looked so much nicer.

She was able to become acquainted with some of the other ghosts, which was better than what she could say she'd managed in her human life. It was one of her early acquaintances who'd made her realize that her source of power was hearing her own name. A hunter who went by the name of Skulker in death had called out to her one day to get her attention, and she could feel the energy crackle to life inside of her. While she'd liked her other ghostly acquaintances, none of them had ever sounded so excited or happy to see her, and it didn't take long for the two of them to start dating.

There hadn't been anything particularly attractive about him per se when she'd met him, but suddenly she found a million different aspects to love. Nothing made her feel better than their nightly ritual.

"Say my name," she'd say, when what she really wanted to say was, "Do you love me?"

"Ember," he'd whisper back, somehow knowing exactly what she really meant every time, but too afraid to respond to the hidden question.

It wasn't exactly what she really wanted from their relationship, but she was still happy. Maybe someone finally loved her, even if it had taken her death for it to happen.

 _A/N: I'm having trouble following the prompts in order. I will be publishing the stories in whatever order I write them on my Tumblr (earpudding), but I want to know if my FF readers want the same thing. If you care one way or the other, please vote through the poll on my profile. My instinct is to just post them in order here, but I'm happy to do whatever my readers prefer._


	5. Monster

**Monster**

As Danny tried to hide his yawn from Mr. Lancer with one hand, he reached for his energy drink with the other.

The ghost attacks seemed to have leveled out, but with an average of five to six ghosts to fight per night with one of the ghosts occasionally being more powerful like Skulker or Johnny 13, Danny's routine amount of sleep was lacking, to say the least. Last night in particular had been brutal, with eight separate ghosts to fight in total, and that wasn't counting the one that had attacked during school hours. To understate matters, Danny was exhausted.

Luckily, the boy had copious amounts of Monster to save him from the day-to-day tiredness. Today's drink was an almost sickeningly sweet flavor called "Absolutely Zero," that, despite making Danny slightly nauseous from the sheer amount of some sort of sugar substitute, was greatly appreciated by the yawning teen.

Danny shuddered to think of the caffeine tolerance he was already building with this habit. Oh well. If it continued to help him save Amity Park without sacrificing even more of his personal life, it was well worth any effects there may be.

 _A/N: I didn't get any feedback on the posting order, so I decided to just post the prompts in whatever order I end up writing them. There should be less waiting for stories this way._


	6. Red

**Red**

Red was the color of his bully's treasured varsity jacket, always traveling wherever its owner went. It was a color that had evolved from daily anxiety to a minor annoyance he suffered through to keep up appearances.

Red was the color of the scratches and cuts he hid when he returned to his classes after thirty-minute "bathroom breaks." It was the color of the minor pains he'd long gotten used to accepting.

Red was the color of Mr. Lancer's face when he was particularly angry with him for earning yet another detention. It was the color of shame and of disappointing everyone who expected better of him.

Red was the color of the massive 'D' scrawled across his most recently returned assignment in his math class. It was the color of the mild fear of explaining to his parents how it had happened again while he watched the disappointment form as clear as day in their expressions.

Red was the color of his current cell phone, at the moment being handed over as punishment for his most recent 'D.' It was the color of his safety net, a way to call for help when things became too much.

Red was the color of the aura of a ghost that had shown up late that afternoon, looking to test its power against the well-known half-ghost. It was the color of an annoyance that had seemed simple enough to handle at the time.

Red was the color of his sister's hair, where he looked to avoid her eyes as he told her he was sneaking out to fight the ghost. It was the color of relying on someone else to cover for his secret life and to make up excuses.

Red was the color of the sky as the sun set at the start of the battle. It was the color of losing the aid of daylight that had been helping him easily see and fight.

Red was the color of the car Sam and Tucker arrived in after hearing the commotion in the streets. It was the color of never-ending loyalty.

Red was the color of Tucker's beret, lying abandoned in the street nearby after its wearer had been knocked back by a strong ecto-blast. It was the color of letting down those he cared about the most.

Red was the color of the blood of his best friends, flowing far too quickly on the ground where they lay, no longer breathing. It was the color of his worst failure yet.

Red was the color of the ecto-blasts he no longer had the will to block. It was the color of what should be painful but was instead hidden beneath a layer of emotional numbness.

It was almost a relief as the abundance of red faded away into black as he joined his friends.


	7. Food

**Food**

"What's the number now?" Sam asked Tucker from across their booth at the Nasty Burger as the two watched their friend run out of the fast food joint.

"Well, this was $4.50, bringing our total up to $326.79," Tucker replied, picking up Danny's abandoned Nasty Burger and sliding his untouched cup of soda over to Sam.

"Impressive. I think it's been at least ten bucks this week so far, and it's only Thursday," Sam commented. She turned to her newly acquired soft drink and took a slow sip.

"Let's see…" Tucker said, picking up his PDA and searching its files. "Here it is! You're right. He's at $11.62 for this week already. Oh well, there's more for me now!" He took the first bite of the burger his friend had left behind.

"Oh, come on!" Danny complained as he walked back in to the Nasty Burger. "You couldn't wait for like ten minutes before stealing my food? Don't count that toward the total! My food is still perfectly fine, so you're the one who forced me to waste it this time, not the ghost."

He snatched his mostly intact drink back from Sam and began to tell his friends about his most recent fight.


	8. Favorite Outfit

**Favorite Outfit**

Danny had never had a favorite outfit before the accident. He was perfectly happy in any old pair of jeans and whatever t-shirt he could find to throw on for school.

After the accident, Danny had one clearly favorite outfit. It was a rather simple outfit, just a certain pair of light blue jeans that were perhaps a tad too big and a loose white t-shirt with a red oval on the chest. To most people, it didn't appear that there was anything particularly special about it to make it his favorite. Only those who knew him well realized its significance: it was the outfit he'd half-died in during the portal accident.

There wasn't much of a practical component. Every time he was majorly injured in his ghost form, he was highly likely to retain a similar wound when he reverted to his human form, usually leaving an obvious bloodstain on the white cotton of the shirt or the light blue denim of the jeans and forcing him to change clothes to avoid any discoveries of the injuries. The jeans, at least, stood up to minor cuts without betraying their locations, but the shirt made any chest or back injuries immediately noticeable. Even if injuries on his upper body weren't located so as to stain his shirt, the shirt made them noticeable by not covering their locations, such as his arms, his wrists, his hands, or the slight glimpse of stomach that would show if he were to stretch his hands in the air. Perhaps the single practical aspect of the outfit was that it was loose enough to hide the fact that he was developing muscles more quickly than it seemed a boy of his supposed activity level should.

The choice of outfit certainly wasn't a result of a lack of clothing options. His parents, moderately disturbed after they'd realized their son had completely stopped changing outfits, had done everything they could think of to get him to wear something different. They'd reminded him of the shirts he'd used to like more than his other shirts. They'd offered several times to take him to shop at any clothing store he wanted and to let him spend as much as he'd like. His parents had sat down together and explained the importance of hygiene to their son as though he was a middle schooler who didn't know any better, even though they knew he logically should understand this by his age. His mother had bought a few shirts for him and stuffed them in the front of his closet where he was bound to notice them. Considering that perhaps this outfit was Danny's version of an orange jumpsuit, Jack had run out and bought several of the same shirt and pair of jeans and left them on Danny's bed so that he couldn't miss them. None of this seemed to convince him to change his clothes any more than he needed to in order to wash them.

Danny didn't talk about the feelings behind his outfit to anyone, so those who understood what it might mean could only guess. Perhaps it brought a sense of comfort and reminded him of the days of the past, when he didn't have the weight of the world on his shoulders as Amity Park's sole protector. Maybe it was something as simple as the slight scent of pure ectoplasm that seemed to never wash out of the shirt, a smell that he'd admitted had inspired feelings of both comfort and power ever since he'd developed a ghost half. It was possible that there weren't even any feelings that drove him to wear it; it could just be that the fabrics themselves were comfortable and so he chose to wear them, though that didn't explain why he wore exactly the same items of clothing rather than buying multiple copies of the shirt and the jeans.

In the end, only Danny could completely understand the reasons why he chose to only wear this outfit. For now, he chose to keep things this way.


	9. Accident

**Accident**

Danny winced as he finally finished his long trek toward his house from the street where he'd just defeated Skulker after a long and painful fight during which he'd admittedly taken more than his fair share of the punches. He sighed as he prepared to enter his house. He'd hoped to be able to phase into his bedroom as usual so he could be sure no one saw him come in, but he was fairly certain that after his earlier fight, he couldn't even summon the power to do that, so he walked up to his door instead.

It was almost one in the morning, but he didn't want to assume it was safe to sneak in without checking first. He peaked through each of the windows on the front side of his house, peering into the total darkness inside for a few seconds before concluding that no one was near the door.

Unfortunately, he was wrong.

"Who's there!?" was the instant response as Danny unlocked the front door and pushed it open. Whoever was there had spoken in what Danny could best describe as shouting while whispering, and he wasn't immediately able to tell who had caught him sneaking into the house. Knowing he'd never be able to sneak up the stairs to his room completely silently, Danny decided to answer.

"It's just me, Danny," he whispered back to whoever had heard him from the kitchen.

"Oh! Danny!" his dad replied, now in a low speaking voice rather than a whisper. "What were you doing out? Isn't your curfew still 10:30?"

Danny walked toward the kitchen, which was dark except for the light coming from the refrigerator that his father was standing next to.

"I, uh… lost track of the time?" Not having expected a confrontation, Danny hadn't prepared an excuse, and the one he'd made on the spot came out more like a question than an answer to his father's question.

"Well, don't do that again. When your mom and I say you need to be home at a certain time, that's when you need to be home."

"Sorry, Dad," Danny apologized. "I'll pay more attention from now on. I'm just going to head up to bed now."

As Danny moved back toward the kitchen's exit, Jack moved toward the light switch, and with a quick flick, the kitchen was suddenly bathed in light just as Danny had turned around a corner, heading for the stairs.

"Wait, son!" Jack called after the lights were on. "Did you get hurt? Let me see!"

Wondering what had prompted that remark, Danny turned back around only to discover a small puddle of blood where he had been standing moments ago. Seeing the damning evidence, Danny panicked and tried to think fast.

"Umm..." Danny stalled. "Yeah, it was just an accident though. Tucker pushed me too hard and I cut my arm on something when I fell. That's actually when I noticed it was so late, so I ran back here."

Jack reached out and pushed up the sleeve of the arm Danny had hesitantly offered.

"You need to be more careful, Danny. Let's clean this up before you go to sleep so it doesn't get infected. Wait here." Jack headed toward the lab, intent on retrieving the first aid kit he and Maddie kept down there in case of any mishaps with their inventions.

Danny took the opportunity to look himself over. Noticing another wound that had bled through the back of his pants leg, he angled the leg away from where he expected his dad to look when he returned.

"Here, your mother and I keep a first aid kit in the lab for emergencies. I wasn't expecting to need to use it on you, but it will do the job," Jack explained as he returned to the kitchen where Danny was still nervously waiting.

As he moved closer, he continued. "I'm going to clean the cut with disinfectant. That'll probably hurt, but it's for your own good, son. Then, I'll just bandage it and you can go to bed."

True to his word, Danny's father started disinfecting the wound, a little surprised by his son's lack of reaction to the sting. It was almost like the boy was used to it, though Jack knew better than that. He'd certainly know if his own son was hurt.

Without another word, he pulled at a roll of bandages and worked on carefully wrapping the cut.

"All done!" Jack proclaimed as he taped the bandage in place. "You tell Tucker to be gentler. This cut looks pretty bad, and you could have made it worse if you'd just left it like that to get infected."

"Sorry. We'll be more careful." Danny frowned, feeling guilty for lying yet again to his father, but Jack interpreted the frown as being the result of the mild scolding and ignored it.

"Go on up to bed, son. You've been up long enough, and you've got school in the morning. Don't think just a cut will get you out of that," he teased. Danny smiled as he backed out of the room.

"Thanks, Dad."


	10. Season Three

**Season Three**

It was weird now that everyone knew that Danny Fenton was Danny Phantom.

He'd hoped that those who had originally learned his secret would respect the fact that his identity was a secret, but those hopes had been in vain. It seemed that everyone in Amity Park knew his secret within one day of his return to the city, and he could only describe how he'd felt since then as weird.

The best thing that had happened after he'd revealed his secret was being fully accepted by his parents. They _had_ been shocked, but they'd gotten over it soon enough. By now, they had gotten used to the fact that he was half ghost, and much of their time around him was filled with questions about his experiences with other ghosts and requests for feedback on whatever invention they were working on at the moment. After some initial persuasion from Danny, his parents had begun to let him freely come and go when he needed to fight ghosts, removing his curfew and taking over for some of his chores so that he had more time to sleep and work on his schoolwork. Even so, they still felt almost exactly like the same family they'd always been.

School had perhaps been the strangest change. Most of his teachers had talked to him after his return to let him know he would be allowed to leave their respective classrooms to fight ghosts if he followed their varying procedures. The students' attitude toward him had completely changed. Whereas before he'd largely been ignored while being bullied by a few other students, now it seemed like everyone wanted to talk to him. They'd crowd around him between classes, shooting question after question at him about what it was like to be half ghost. Dash had made the most dramatic change in attitude; suddenly, instead of shoving Danny in lockers and beating him up, he was Danny's biggest fan, always among the students who would flock to him between classes and during their lunch and free periods. Danny had been shocked when Dash had pulled him aside after school the first day after his revelation and vehemently apologized to the boy he had bullied for years now. Danny hadn't been hit even once by any human since, and he considered that to be one of the major perks of revealing his identity.

He'd received more free merchandise than he had use for when he was out in the town with his friends. It seemed like every business owner wanted to give him something for free to thank him for his service. He wasn't about to complain about the free meals at the Nasty Burger, but he didn't have much use for all of the Danny Phantom-themed clothing he'd been given by now; he'd stopped counting the clothes and accessories after the sixth t-shirt he'd gotten.

Even Jazz was taking advantage of the fact that his secret was public now. She'd apparently had an admissions essay about how she'd helped her half-ghost brother sitting on her hard drive since a few months after she'd learned what he was. Now that the world knew about him, she was free to use the (admittedly well-written) essay in her college applications.

Tucker had unsuccessfully attempted to profit off of his identity as well. His goal had been to serve as the gatekeeper to Danny, only allowing paying customers to talk to his friend. Unfortunately, he'd only had a few customers before Dash had wanted to talk to his idol, and it turned out that the end of the bullying only extended to Danny himself, leaving Tucker as fair game despite Danny's protests. Needless to say, after the first beating, Tucker wasn't so eager to continue his business in the same way. Instead, he'd turned to selling both the free merchandise Danny kept receiving and copies of the high definition photos of Phantom in action he had amassed.

After a while Sam had admitted to him that she was relieved that fewer girls seemed to be chasing after Phantom in hopes of a date now that they knew he was Danny Fenton, who was happily attached to Sam Manson. Paulina was one of the few who still refused to give up on Phantom despite knowing this, but she somehow seemed like less of a threat now.

With everyone being more understanding of his situation now that they knew of it, Danny had less to stress about since there was no more need to hide who he was or to sneak around. His parents were able to help with fighting the ghosts and had quite obviously stopped shooting at him, making it easier to keep the ghosts out of Amity Park. With his newly found free time, he was able to complete his schoolwork and get enough sleep most nights while still being able to dedicate time to practicing his powers, and the extra power made it even easier to send the ghosts away when they showed up and had seemed to even scare away a few of the ghosts permanently, making it all the more simple to do his self-appointed job.

Overall, things had gotten much weirder, but it was much better this way.


	11. Wes

**Wes**

"I know who you are." Danny didn't even need to look back toward the voice to know who it was that was trailing obnoxiously close behind him in the hallway on his way to history class. The same teenager had been saying the same thing to him _literally_ every day, starting barely a few weeks after he'd discovered his ghost powers himself.

Wes Weston had become a major pain in his ass ever since then, and he only grew worse with each day. What had apparently started as silent suspicions had become whispered questioning had become terrifyingly straightforward accusations in the hallway such as this one.

When he'd first begun what had turned into this ritual, Danny had been terrified someone would hear the boy and seriously consider what he was saying, coming to the conclusion Danny most desperately wanted to avoid. The teen didn't seem to have any sense of respect or the slightest idea of the seriousness of the repercussions, considering that he paid _no_ attention to whether he was alone with Danny or they were in a crowded hallway full of people who could hear him; no matter what, he would seek out Danny throughout the day to rephrase the same personal attack each day.

He'd tried playing dumb, but that got him nowhere as it would prompt the other boy to be more specific with his claims. "You're a ghost" and "You're Danny Phantom" were other common phrases from Wes. Danny had quickly realized that this boy was obsessed with the idea that he was Phantom before coming to the conclusion that he had no way to stop Wes from doing this.

And who the heck was Wes in the first place? The first time he walked up to Danny with these questions and personal attacks, Danny couldn't place him; he'd never once seen this guy in his life, but somehow this Wes already knew about him. The boy had started out less angry and more interested in him, which gave him a chance to get to know him better at first. He was in the ninth grade and really liked basketball—he was hoping to make the school team soon. He wasn't a great student, but he excelled in his science labs and he was already thinking about science majors he could choose if he went to college. He lived with his mother and his four-year-old brother a couple blocks from the school. "It's the only house on the block with a basketball hoop," he'd described it—before the relationship turned sour. Danny hadn't minded the boy so much while he'd still thought he'd be able to redirect the questions and throw off suspicions, but this didn't last long before Wes grew angry about Danny's constant avoidance of his Phantom conversations.

That was what had led to the current situation. Try as he might, Danny couldn't seem to completely avoid Wes in school. He'd made sure to stay several blocks away from the street Wes had said he lived on, and he never went anywhere near the basketball courts after school, but there was no avoiding Wes in school. Danny knew because he'd sure as hell tried: different routes to class, skipping some of his classes altogether some days, waiting out Wes until the last minute and then sprinting to class while the hallways were empty… nothing seemed to work.

He'd managed to ignore the accusations during his hurried walk to class today, and he threw himself through the classroom door as fast as possible to escape Wes, who he knew had a different class to get to. He caught a glimpse of Wes glaring at him before the boy moved on.

"I don't know how much longer I can _handle_ him. When's he going to give this up already!?" Danny exclaimed in a whisper as he settled in his desk next to Sam with a couple minutes to spare before the start of their class.

"When's who going to give up?" Sam asked with a confused glance up from her open notebook.

"Wes!" Danny answered.

"Who the heck is Wes?" Sam repeated the same question Danny had thought when he first met the obsessive boy.

"That guy who's been following me around for awhile now," Danny explained. "I didn't know him until after you-know-what, but I thought you would. He's only one grade below us."

"Uhh… what do you mean a guy's been following you around?" Sam questioned. "Tucker and I are with you most of the time, and _I've_ never seen anyone following you before." Danny tilted his head at her.

"You can't miss him with hair that red! He's been following me for weeks now, ever since I got my—," he lowered his voice, "—powers after the accident. He was just asking me questions before but then he started straight up accusing me of being Phantom!"

Sam didn't have a response for this before their history teacher moved in front of the blackboard and called the students' attention to class. Danny was left to wonder why neither he nor Sam had ever heard of Wes before now.

With the bell ringing after an otherwise typical history class, Danny and Sam left the classroom and headed toward their keyboarding class to meet Tucker, only for Danny to have nearly the same conversation with his other friend.

"Dude, I have no idea who you're talking about," Tucker had responded to Danny's questions, only leaving the halfa with even more questions than he'd had before.

What should have been a calm Tuesday night due to a lack of ghost attacks in the vicinity turned into a restless series of attempts to sleep with little success. Almost as exhausted as if he'd been fighting ghosts half the night, Danny trudged his way to school again the next morning, but this time he was determined to get answers.

Instead of fearfully dodging Wes's accusations today, Danny turned them back around on Wes.

"Forget me! Who are _you_?" He changed the topic as soon as the boy started on his regular attacks. "Why doesn't anyone know who you are!?"

Naturally, Danny didn't get any answers from the boy. He got a hurt and angry glare before the normally obsessive boy turned away and left him alone for his walk to class for the first time in weeks. Even more frustrated than before, Danny gave up and headed toward his classroom without his entourage this time.

Wes quit following him to class completely. He'd still see the boy glaring at him in the cafeteria or at the opposite end of a hallway sometimes, but he'd stopped approaching Danny ever since their confrontation. Danny had no idea what to think anymore. That was the way Danny's school life went on for quite some time.

After awhile—the weather had gone from slightly chilly and cloudy all the way to bright, sunny, and uncomfortably warm since their last face-to-face conversation—Danny finally saw Wes in the cafeteria for a long enough time to point him out to Sam and Tucker at lunch one day.

"Over there," he'd subtly pointed, trying to avoid Wes's notice for fear of scaring him away to another part of the school yet again. "That's the guy I was telling you about. That's Wes."

"Wait, which one?" Sam asked, squinting across the lunchroom in the direction Danny had pointed.

"The one with the bright red hair who's weirdly tall for a freshman," Danny described the boy, still watching him despite the obvious glare toward himself.

"Danny, there's no one with red hair over there…" Tucker said like it was an obvious fact that he was describing to a very young child. "I only see Dash, Kwan, Paulina, and a really hot girl with brown hair. There's no guy we don't know over there right now."

"But he's _right there_!" Danny quietly exclaimed, trying not to make a scene in the cafeteria despite the situation. He wasn't completely successful. "He's still staring right at us!"

"He's right, Danny," Sam responded, backing up Tucker. "There's no one else over there. There wasn't anyone staring at us until you started yelling a second ago." She threw a glance over Tucker's shoulder at the band geeks at the next table, curiously staring back at their table as they tried to figure out what was going on to make the normally close-knit trio fight.

"Forget it," Danny spat across the table as he grabbed his tray of mostly untouched food and stood up, frustrated. "I'm going to patrol until Lancer's class."

After a quick transformation in the bathroom and a few minutes in the air, Danny had cooled down enough to regret the way he'd reacted to his friends, but it was already getting close to time for the bell to ring for the students to move to their afternoon classes. Sighing, Danny promised himself to make it up to Sam and Tucker after school. They wouldn't joke around about this with him. It wasn't their fault they'd reacted honestly to yet another weird thing going on in Amity Park.

Seeing no signs of a ghost attack anywhere in sight, he swooped down and phased back into the school bathroom before transforming back and walking out to head to his English class where he would hopefully have a chance to start apologizing to Sam and Tucker for the way he'd treated them at lunch. That wasn't what fate had in store for him today, however.

"It's really rude to point and stare at people, you know."

"Greeeeaaaaat," Danny sarcastically dragged out the word upon hearing the familiar voice, "Just who I wanted to run into."

The redhead smirked at him but managed to make the expression look less friendly and more mocking than anyone else Danny knew.

"That's it! You're giving me answers this time!" Danny exclaimed in the empty hallway. "Why doesn't anyone know you? You like sports, so why don't you hang out with the other jocks? You're only one year below me! _Someone_ should know who you are, but I've never heard anyone mention you!"

Instead of giving the answers Danny desperately sought or returning Danny's own anger in kind, Wes seemed to deflate.

"…I don't know," he admitted in the smallest voice Danny had ever heard from him. Gone were the confident accusations and the over-interested questions, and left in their place was a scared boy who seemed more like a four-year-old than fourteen now. After a long pause, he continued. "I was always really popular! The _jocks_ were my friends. They were helping me practice to get ready for tryouts for awhile, but I haven't seen my friends for so long… I don't know anyone here anymore. I look and look for anyone I know, but they just disappeared and I don't even know when it happened!" Danny was a little surprised to see that Wes had brought himself to tears when he looked into the boy's eyes as the silence went on.

"Wait, so you don't know anyone here… and no one in the whole school seems to know you…" Danny was getting an idea of what was going on, but he'd already scared the boy away once in the past by saying the wrong thing. But it was the right thing to do to help Wes understand, right? That was better than letting things go on unchanged… right?

"Wes…" Danny trailed off, trying to find the best way to word what he needed to say. He decided to take the straightforward route. "What year are you going to graduate?"

"1994, just one year after you," Wes replied, still trying to fight back his tears at the thought of all of his friends disappearing.

That one year—a year when he himself hadn't even been old enough to walk yet—was all the confirmation Danny needed for his theory. It shouldn't be so surprising in a place like Amity Park. This was someone who knew and was known by no one. This was a boy who hadn't lived in years.

Danny didn't know quite how to reveal what he realized to the boy who wasn't his friend but wasn't quite his enemy either. He didn't even know that he wanted to share what he'd figured out. How would it even help? What use does a ghost have for knowing it's not a part of the living world any longer? So he didn't share what he now knew.

"Why don't you hang out with us from now on?" He asked instead.


	12. Star

**Star**

Eight-year-old Danny Fenton had spent many painstaking hours crafting a reproduction of the night sky on his bedroom ceiling.

The creation reflected Amity Park's September skyline, and it had been the only thing the boy had wanted to talk about for the weeks surrounding its creation. He couldn't seem to tear his gaze away at night as his glow-in-the-dark stars stole the show in his bedroom, neglecting his schoolwork and even recreation for far more time than the Fentons were willing to admit before they had noticed and intervened. Even then, Danny remained enamored with his constellation replicas.

Eight-year-old Danny Fenton had been the most obviously space-obsessed Danny, but nine-year-old Danny was a little more subtle and a little more obsessed, and ten-year-old Danny was that little bit more enchanted, and so on and so forth. Sixteen-year-old Danny loved the stars still more and was at this moment laying silent in his darkened bedroom, spacing out as he stared into mock-space.

While it seemed counterintuitive, the fake stars held more allure for Danny as his life became more stressful and complicated. He spent increasing amounts of time just lying in his bed staring at the glow of the stars despite his notably decreasing amount of free time. The more time he spent fighting ghosts, the more time he wanted to spend spacing out and forgetting the outside world afterward. There was a distinct comfort that came from forgetting the entire world around him and simply staring upward for an hour or two, long enough to forget that he'd spent two hours fighting ghosts today, that he had three hours of homework due the next day, that he could still get five hours of sleep tonight if he just started now, that he was clearly and undeniably in over his head right now.

Sometimes he wished on the ceiling stars, silly as it had seemed the few times he'd told others when he was younger. If shooting stars held the intrinsic power to grant one's deepest wishes, who was he to say that plastic glow-in-the-dark replicas couldn't have that same ability? As one might expect, his wishes had morphed over the past year, from, "I wish Paulina would notice me soon," to, "I wish Dash would leave me alone," and eventually to hopes more along the lines of, "I wish my parents would stop shooting at me instead of the real ghosts," and "I wish everything would just stop." Unfortunately for Danny, these wishes made while desperately curled up alone in the dark had stopped coming true quite a long time ago when the wishes had stopped being as simple as the hope that his mother would buy him his favorite ice cream or that he would do well on one of his fifth-grade math tests.

Even Danny himself could admit any other teenager that thought the way he'd come to think would easily be diagnosed with depression, but he knew he couldn't do anything about it as things were. How do you explain to others that you've become indifferent to the world now that it's become a constantly failing balance of trying to get enough sleep while maintaining decent grades, staying healthy, and hiding a secret alter ego that protects everyone in a 20-mile radius? All he could do was fight the frequent urge to sit still and do absolutely nothing along with the occasional inner drive to jump into a clearly fatal situation just to end the slow torture of his life that stretched across weeks and months now. He still knew that he was Amity Park's best protection as things stood, and that helped stop him from ever fully considering some of the ideas the newly evident darker parts of his mind supplied at random. Alone in his bedroom was the only time he allowed himself to completely feel how his mind wanted him to feel; here was his safe space to check out of reality for a few hours at a time to escape from it all and recover from the physical, mental, and emotional toll of what his life had become.

This was life now.


	13. Happily Ever After

**Happily Ever After**

Here's how things were going to go: Valerie was going to take down Phantom, and after the strongest ghost in Amity Park was gone—dead? Can ghosts die in a sense? Or is it just _gone_ , vanished, not here anymore?—the remaining ghosts wouldn't be so attracted to her home without a ringleader to bring them there. The low-level scum that remained would be easy for the Fentons and maybe the Guys in White to handle on their own; no one would need her to keep up this frankly exhausting job anymore, and she could move on with her own life ghost-free.

She'd have so much time to spend with her friends, the real ones, the ones who didn't immediately shun her when her dad had lost his job. Maybe she'd say she cut back on her hours at the Nasty Burger if they asked why she could hang out with them now, or maybe she'd just say she'd been working on scheduling her priorities better. It didn't matter, she just needed a simple excuse to hide the weird and somewhat dark couple of years she'd been having since she'd taken up her "second job."

She'd see movies, eat junk food, go shopping with her girlfriends, cheer on the guys at their respective sports games, anything and everything she'd lost time for recently. She could finally get around to painting her bedroom like she'd idly been wanting to do for months at this point. She remembered her friends enthusing over a couple different video games as time went on, and she'd have time to try them out and to understand what the big deal was. Instead of squeezing in whatever homework she could between ghost hunting sessions—and forget studying at all!—she could finally dedicate the time she needed to look attractive to the right colleges before the time came to submit applications.

Sure, even now she knew she'd miss ghost hunting in a way; it was all she'd done for almost a year now. It made her feel powerful, in control, strong. But that would be _so_ easy to ignore in exchange for being able to get back on track for the nice normal life she wanted to live.

She had almost two years of high school left. It might take some time to completely fix her grades, but she'd still have some time left over right away to start spending time with her friends, catching up on everything she'd missed through the exhausted haze of the past year. Call her a stereotypical girl if you must, but Valerie was looking forward to catching up on the gossip about her classmates, the fashion trends she _had_ to try now, and the hypotheses on who was hooking up with who. She knew it would still backfire on her, just like it used to, but she was stronger now. If powerful ghosts couldn't tear her down, why should she let rumors do it?

She'd have time to try dating again. It was something she honestly had little experience in. She seemed to be more of a late bloomer, never really noticing any crushes before she'd started high school, and just as she'd been getting into dating, her ghost-hunting job had taken precedence. There was one boy in particular she hadn't been able to get over despite having to end things to protect him from the potential negative effects of her temporary career. She wasn't ready to immediately jump back into it, but she was already putting together a plan to inspire him to give her another chance, this time for a real relationship.

She could take her time and savor the chase. Maybe she wouldn't have a boyfriend for a few months, but she'd spent enough time supporting herself by now that she knew she could handle some independence in her life. She no longer felt that _need_ to have the right man at her side, but damn if she didn't still want this one in her life. Regardless, she now knew she could live—and quite happily at that—without constantly chasing a romantic relationship.

So she'd give it time. Maybe they wouldn't be together right away, but if she had her way, they'd be able to give what might be _the_ relationship for her by the spring. After going on several dates and getting to know each other even better than they had the first time, he'd probably ask her to their junior prom. It was such an expected thing to do, a given really, but the thought of it still made her heart flutter, so unlike her. They'd have a good time, and maybe it would be the night they discussed where their relationship was going in the future.

She'd get to know his friends better. They'd seemed a little hostile the first time they'd dated, but it was important to Valerie that his friends like her so that they could all spend time together. It might take time, but they'd all learn to get along on friendly terms, and they'd come to legitimately enjoy each others' company.

They'd start deciding which colleges they'd be going to—was he going to college? She needed to find out, it would be a lot harder to get her dad on board with them dating if he wasn't—and maybe they'd take each other into consideration. She wouldn't force him to any decision, but she could already see them picking the same college or at least two colleges close to each other. They'd take some time their first year to make new friends while still dating, but they'd talk about moving in together in a cute apartment just the right size for them. It wouldn't be luxurious by any means, but it would be cozy and they would be happy being able to see each other all the time. She'd keep up with her friends from high school and her new college friends, but she'd still have plenty of time for studying and for him too.

They'd graduate and start their careers, and maybe eventually he would propose—somewhere laidback where they'd come together often in their time together, not some stuffy and overly formal venue. If they'd made it so long in their relationship, of course she'd say yes, and they'd spend some time planning out a small wedding for their closer friends and parents. If he was anything like she'd sensed during their initial time dating, he'd agree to a small wedding with a fun bout of traveling for awhile after the ceremony.

They'd be a married couple that lasted. Of course, they'd have their ups and downs, but they'd always come to a compromise eventually on issues, and they wouldn't let the negatives bring them down too much. They would both remember that being happy together is more important than any little issue they might deal with.

It was too early to be thinking of some things now, but they'd deal with those things later when they were ready to. Thirty-year-old Valerie would know much better whether she wanted kids and which career path she should aim for. Fifty-year-old Valerie will have figured out her will and power of attorney and whatever else was painful to think about but might come up eventually in older age. Whatever they did individually and together, they'd come out of it happy.

Everything could still be perfect. She could fix her life instead of keeping up with what it had become with this career. She unleashed the final shot at her target, and Phantom went down, down, down, this time for good.


	14. Folklore

**Folklore**

Maddie Fenton never failed to be appalled by the sheer lack of basic knowledge the vast majority of people had of her profession.

She couldn't blame it completely on the people themselves—after all, the Department of Education had completely ignored her many pleas to add a basic introduction to ectoplasmic beings to all middle or high school curriculums, no matter how compelling the attached research was each time—but still, it was horrifying to realize the ignorance of most citizens to her field of research. For goodness' sake, how could so many people actually believe in obvious myths such as normal humans dying and coming back to haunt their own homes while also vehemently denying the existence of natural pockets of ectoplasmic energy creating temporary ghost portals!? How could people believe in hoaxes like the Mothman but not in thoroughly documented ghosts like the Box Ghost!?

There were entire websites dedicated to ghosts with _no_ reliable history of existence, and yet not a single website describing any of the science behind ecto-energy, the basics of ghost formation, or statistically accurate research on creating weapons effective against ghosts—excluding the one she and Jack had bribed Danny's friend Tucker to help create and maintain.

This was what drove Maddie to take matters into her own hands. If the government wouldn't take the proper responsibility to teach its citizens what they needed to know about ghosts, then she'd just have to do it herself. She and Jack had been talking about it for weeks now, enthusing about the chance to teach others about their research and the practical results, deciding which courses to prioritize (the evolution of ghost abilities would have to be taught at some point of course, but surely an introduction to defense against ectoplasmic beings should come before that), and figuring out how to schedule their work so that they could handle both their current research and this new opportunity (work harder in research for the time being to take a break from it later? Or work this in so that both became simultaneous part-time projects?).

Jazz was, as usual, a bit of a downer about the idea, but Maddie would just have to give her some time and space to realize how useful these video courses would be for the average person. Then, she'd come around. She couldn't pin down Danny's reaction; at times, he seemed oddly nervous about the idea, but other times he was quietly enthusiastic about it. She certainly couldn't depend on her son's help with that kind of reaction, but she could live with that. He was still a child, after all, and he had his own responsibilities to worry about.

She was more than ready to jump into this project by the time they were ready. She couldn't wait to truly leave her mark on the world.

"Hi there, viewers! We're the researchers behind all of the technology at Fentonworks, and today my husband and I are going to teach you all about…"


	15. Frostbite

**Frostbite**

Ghost powers don't come without their downsides to the human body, and in Danny's opinion, some were far worse than others.

He knew there were side effects to using some of his powers less than a day after the lab accident when his first few ghost rays left his palms burning the same way he remembered from one childhood adventure involving young and unbridled curiosity, questionable adult supervision, and an unfortunately accessible stovetop. Intangibility sometimes resulted in a few uncomfortable seconds of not quite being able to breathe, overshadowing was at times followed by short but intense bouts of dissociation—questioning who he really was and how he got here in one moment and having his normal complete understanding of himself the next—, and prolonged flight might lead to an episode of vertigo in the air or upon landing.

It didn't happen every time he used his powers. He wouldn't quite call the side effects rare, but there _were_ times when he could make it through a full battle against another ghost without incident. He'd been able to tell that things were worse when he hadn't had enough sleep or when he was sick, but from his own experience, he still couldn't fully predict when he'd regret using his powers and when he'd be perfectly fine afterward.

The outcome wasn't always the same either. His first ghost ray had been frankly terrifying; the burning sensation had been so bad that he'd been sure the ectoplasm had _actually_ burned him from his palm to his fingertips, and the pain didn't completely fade away for over an hour after he used the ghost ray. In a way, he'd been lucky that he couldn't completely control his powers at first because many accidental ghost rays later had taught him to not expect such great pain as the unfortunate first time. Sure, he'd certainly feel the results afterward sometimes, but there'd never been a time that was near as shockingly awful as the first time he'd used the power. After getting used to using the ghost ray, more than half of the uses didn't result in any pain, and the remaining times usually only brought on a less painful hot tingle in his palm. It was less like the sensation of reaching a hand into a full-on fire and more akin to perhaps holding a hand just a tad too close to a burning candle wick for just a bit too long. Even knowing this progression, he'd decided early on to avoid using his eyes to create ghost rays after feeling the same sensations but magnified by the more sensitive nature of eyes.

Intangibility was a more pleasant power to use because while it _might_ result in the sensation of having too little air to breathe, that had turned out to be a much rarer side effect and was typically over in less than ten seconds. He still tried to avoid using it in fights and other situations in which he couldn't afford to be incapacitated for any amount of time just to be safe, but after the first few times it had happened to him had forced him to grow used to the new sensation, he wasn't so worried about that result anymore. It was jarring, no denying that, but it didn't serve as enough of a deterrent to stop him very often.

Flight was something he'd needed to experiment with. He hadn't been able to fly far at all when he'd first gotten his powers for fear of falling with the sense of dizziness and slight confusion that came from straining his new abilities. Paying attention to his ability to handle flying had been what had prompted him to notice in the first place that he was growing out of some of the side effects. He couldn't name an exact distance he could fly without incident now, but he periodically went out flying solely to test his own limits so that he had a loose idea of what he could do in battle.

Barring his first experiences with his powers, cryokinesis had proven to have the least tolerable side effect of all of his powers so far; it had easily become the hardest to mentally prepare for. Even a small ray from just one finger quickly brought on what Danny, Sam, and Tucker had discovered were the symptoms of frostbite. An acute sensation of _stop stop stop, this is too cold STOP_ didn't last long before the arguably even less comfortable feeling of complete numbness in the finger became apparent. Unlike the usual reactions he had to his powers, the cryokinesis left him in discomfort for hours as his freezing cold skin was slowly rewarmed and healed of all symptoms by his ghost core, leaving him to hide his clumsiness and off-color skin from most of the people around him in the meantime. He could slightly speed up the process by carefully warming his hand from the outside as well, but he'd found the power simply wasn't worth the results.

In some ways, he could greatly appreciate his own ghost powers. Other parts of having supernatural powers, not so much, but he'd realized long ago that it was simply a matter of maximizing the good and minimizing the bad results of one unexpected lab accident.


	16. Peace

**Peace**

For all of his memorable life, Danny had hated December twenty-fifth more than any other day of the year. He distinctly remembered one day in middle school when he received not one, not two, but _three_ failed assignments from different teachers on the same day that he managed to fall on the concrete during recess—in a time before his bully victimhood had truly started to top it off, meaning the fall was frustratingly through no fault but his own, resulting from clumsiness in a developing body—breaking his arm, and even _that_ couldn't compete with any Christmas for worst day in his life.

Christmas had never been about spending time with his family and friends, though that wasn't through too much fault of his own. He'd take ownership over his own choice to storm away from his parents during each of their heated and extended Santa arguments, but if he had to blame anyone, it would be both of his parents—parents who normally could respectfully disagree when arguments sprung up in the presence of their children but who threw that policy out the window when it came to this one specific point of contention.

For a minimum of two weeks every year, the Fenton household could be found split in a near-constant battle over the existence of one Santa Claus, Maddie often starting her arguments with snide, self-assured comments on the anti-Santa side while Jack was more prone to burst into joyful assertions of the man's obvious and assured existence. Naturally, either one stating anything even tangentially related to the holiday or the jolly fat man himself would spark a battle from the opposing side. The arguments had long ceased being original, instead becoming repetitions of years-old points that had already been talked to death many a time.

Other families mostly celebrated the holiday by secretly shopping for gifts, decorating their living spaces, baking treats, and spending quality time together. Danny's family mostly "celebrated" the holiday with lively and heated debates with a cursory effort to join in on more normal family activities like decorating a tree or baking cookies. The worst part was that nobody seemed to see the dysfunction except Danny: his parents seemed to believe that jumping down each other's throats for the holidays was acceptable provided they forgave and forgot after each Christmas until the next year, Jazz continued to happily ignore her family most of the time with her head in a book, and Sam and Tucker didn't seem to notice anything wrong with his family's celebrations. Only Danny ever voiced complaints about the season.

The lab accident was what had eventually led Danny to reconsider his opinion on the holiday. There were countless cons to become a human-ghost hybrid, but oddly enough, one of the pros was earning the not-quite-friendship-but-not-enemyship-either with the full-fledged ghosts for one day each year. While Danny was hesitant to trust the other ghosts for the first few years, he'd developed a temporary faith in them soon enough and found a safe space within the Ghost Zone to hide out and arguably slightly enjoy the one day each year he'd once been completely unable to deal with.

It was something that took some getting used to, to put it simply. Danny had to reconcile the Skulker who wanted to skin him alive with the Skulker who just wanted to regale the crowd with tales of his most exhilarating hunts, the Ember who wanted to brainwash every human being into worshipping her with the Ember who wanted to play some quiet acoustic pieces for her fellow ghosts to enjoy, the Box Ghost who wanted everything to do with boxes with the Box Ghost who… actually still just wanted everything to do with boxes, but less destructively than usual, and there were plenty of other ghosts beyond those three who seemed to completely change for the better on the day of the truce. Danny himself had to fight the need to _stop_ whatever mischief the ghosts were up to, but he'd found that even having to fight that impulse couldn't ruin the day for him. After an awkward few years of getting used to the whole situation, Danny was now mostly comfortable with listening to Ember's music, Vlad's blend of self-righteousness and sucking up, and most of the ghosts' stories revolving around their respective obsessions, and he even contributed some of his own stories about his civilian life when the conversations came to lulls. Sure, the vast majority of 364 days of the year was still filled with the annoyance and sometimes drudgery of dealing with the same ghosts day in and day out, but if twenty-four hours of peace and rest was what Danny could get, he would damn well enjoy the short break while it lasted.

It was Christmas once again, and this year, Danny Fenton was at peace.


End file.
